While the Internet has become a widespread means of communicating data, it has recently become a principal means of communicating video data around the world. Most web pages include text, graphics, and other non-video data. However, as broadband has become more ubiquitous, more and more end users are receiving and transmitting video over the Internet. Video files and some audio files tend to be larger than other types of files. The availability of broadband allows users to transmit and receive larger files in acceptable time frames. This fact, at least in part, has led to the increase in the amount of video and audio data communicated over the Internet.
Some web sites that host (store) videos and other content allow users to post video and other types of content for other users to view. In addition, some such web sites allow third party web sites to embed code associated with a video (or other content) on their web sites to allow visitors to such third party web sites to view the video. In other words, an operator of the host server allows third party web sites to embed code in the web pages (of the third party web site) that include a link pointing to video content on the host server. Users who visit the third party web site and click on the link receive the video from the host server or, alternately, the video is loaded when the web pages loads. Thus, the user viewing a given web site may receive web pages from the third party web site's server while also receiving video content from a video host server. Thus, the video (or other content) is syndicated via third party web sites.
Subsequently, a second user who visits the third party web site also may want to publish the video (or other content) on their own web site (and thereby become a syndicator of the video). To do so, the second user would also receive embedded code from the host server to embed in their website—or alternately, may be provided a copy of the embedded code from the third party web site. Typically, the embedded code for each third party web site will be substantially the same (or identical) and simply include a unique content identifier (content ID). The content ID is transmitted from the client (i.e., the user's browser) in a content request to the host server and allows the host server to identify the content to be transmitted to the client.
Currently, there is no means to allow the host server to track the syndication of content across the internet. In other words, there is no means to allow a host server to monitor the proliferation of the embedded code (that is used to publish the content on third party web sites) from one third party web site to other third party web sites and further, to monitor the content views for which a syndicating web site is responsible (i.e., the number of content views of a syndicating web site and of all the third party web sites that have become syndicated via that syndicating web site). Such information will become more valuable as video and video advertisements (advertisements that are presented along with video content—either before, after, during, and/or physically near the video) become more and more ubiquitous. Tracking the syndication of content and other advantages are provided by one or more embodiments of the present invention.